Okay, quick-ish.

I’ve mentioned before that I started writing very young, and at some point—maybe late high school or college—I finally understood that the key to being a successful writer was all about vocabulary. Not using common words and only using extraordinary ones! The thesaurus was my best friend. Using a rare word just showed what a good writer I was, and using an obscure word… well… clearly the money and awards were going to be rolling in. Once I finished something.

One of the places I… okay, wait, let’s just be honest. This is a horrible way to approach writing. Just awful. I shouldn’t be trying to make my writing hard to understand or read. If people need to pause on every sentence and try to work out a word’s meaning from context… that’s not great.

That said, one of the places where I did this a lot was dialogue. Somehow I got it in my head that only losers used the same dialogue tags on the same page. There were thousands of better words out there, and I was going to use every. Single. One of them.

As I’ve mentioned before, the first time I got to sit down with an editor to talk about my writing, his opening words to me were not “this is amazing, let me give you twenty bazillion dollars” they were, in fact, to just use said. Stop with all the muttering, mumbling, grumbling, stating, shouting, hollering, whispering, gasping, declaring, ejaculating (oh yes), exclaiming, and calling out and just use said. Said, he told me, is invisible.

There are a lot of folks out there who will try to convince you said is pedestrian or boring or flat. That it’s what lesser writers use because they can’t think of anything else. I mean, there’s dozens of lists on the internet—many from writing teachers!—of “better” dialogue tags to use.

But the truth is, said doesn’t slow writing down. It doesn’t trip people up. It’s what most professional writers use. It’s a solid workhorse that lets me save those other dialogue tags for when they’ll actually matter, when it’s important that readers hear that mutter or shout or exclamation.

Plus…

Okay, let’s have another moment of brutal honesty. When we start out as writers, a lot of our dialogue is… not good. It’s awkward and on the nose and kind of flat on the page. Mine definitely was. So I think sometimes we latch onto those other dialogue tags because they help us get the point across. They’re sort of like an adverb or adjective for the whole sentence, in the sense that they’re not inherently wrong, but I also probably wouldn’t need them if my dialogue was stronger

So some people are a bit… shall we say, reluctant to let go of the idea they should always use much, much more than said.

Don’t worry about them. Just use said most of the time. I can use the other ones too, sure, but I try to think of them like exclamation points. The more I use them, the less powerful they become.

And I want my writing to be powerful.

Now, just to be contrary, next time I’d like to talk about not using said.

Until then, go write.